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ARDLY had our Conference chair-man, on Monday, opened the ses-sions than the major problems of our somewhat diffuse computer field began to raise their ugly heads one by one from the platform.Mr. Engstrom, who works for the Defense Department, immediately raised for most of us and for himself the ques-tion-How can an art, a science, an in-dustry, if you will (depending upon how you look at it), with such tremendous
"pay-off" in individual human effort, fail to be inflationary in its own require-ments for manpower and material? The questioner from the audience who information machines in the Defense Department and its grim war games are computers through 15 countries, returned to this theme. In England and on the continent, he notes, the men who a few months ago were leaders in university laboratories have now left their graduate students behind, or else have taken these students with them, to work in one of many new commercial computer design laboratories. Here in this country the program for these sessions has reiterated the problem.
Three years ago, a joint computer con-ference was studded with papers by university personnel and members of
JOHN W CARR III is professor of mathematics at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Mich This is a condensed text of the Conference Sum-mary presented at the Eastern Joint Computer Con-ference In New York, N. Y .. December 12, Hl5fl.
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university laboratories. Today, with the exception of ably presented papers from the Massachusetts Institute of Tech-nology's Lincoln Laboratory and the Stanford Research Institute, no univer-sity representatives are participating except in the less important positions of chairmen and, of course, conference summarizers.
This is not a complaint, but a call to meditation. There are in fact still ac-tivities continuing in universities, and I might mention a few. First of all, Prof. Pedis and a small group at Purdue University and the Carnegie Institute of Technology are among the first to write an algebraic language and a translater for two different (and competing) machines, so that problems in the same language can be performed both an IBM (Inter-national Business Machines Corporation) and Datatron equipment. Prof. Scott and a small group at Michigan are developing important teaching tech-niques in computer design. Their build-ing-block computer has been begun, and they are carrying on fundamental re-search in high-speed components. Prof.
Rubinoff of the University of Pennsyl-vania, with graduate students and other professors, has finally shown that digital computers can outdo analog computers in real-time simulation. Prof. Meagher and his group at Illinois University have
First, the absence of automatic program-ming techniques and any discussion about them should be marked. This is not in criticism of the program committee; I have in my files a copy of a letter of some months ago written by one of the members bemoaning the lack of papers in that area. We have not heard any discussions about automatic programming techniques at the meetings, but there do exist such
new computer techniques in the lan-guages such as that of Professor Pedis' common language for the 650 and the Datatron, the Boeing common language for the Univac Scientific and the IBM types 650 and 701, the Fortran language for the 704, and the AT -3 algebraic translators planned for the Univac.
The absence here, I think, is one of shall call "associative memory." We all have it. When you think of Christ-mas, you think, perhaps, in terms of snow and your overshoes and your wife, who reminds you to put them on, and so forth.
The first such man-planned associative memory that I know of has been pro-programmed by Cliff Shaw at the Rand Corporation, working with Newell and Simon of the Carnegie Institute of Technology. They term this rather amorphous portion of the
J
ohnniac internal memorv "The Pit," because they can toss any piece of information they wish to remember at random into any vacant position in this "blob," if you will, with the full anticipation of retrieving it later on as part of a se-quence of associations. Remembering how B-boxes and floating-point finally became part of the hardware, I will rather softly predict that perhaps one of the future uses of Mr. Buck's cryotron might be in such an associative memory.Our third problem, then, is communi-cation; and no one put it more eruditely or wittily than Sir Watson-Watt. Those of us who had the pleasure of hearing have thrust themselves rather osten-tatiously before us, starting from Mr.
Engstrom's opening remarks:
1. The problem of manpower, or how to continue to find personnel to satisfy the needs of ,Lll everexpanding computer re-search ecunomy.
2. The problem of the preservation and rehabilitation of the position of the univer-sities in the area of computer circuits, de-sign, and logic.
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3. The problem of intercommunication across the artificial barriers, such as, for example, that which separates the logical program designer from the logical hardware designer. might suspect, our university research and educational programs. This ten-tative solution does not, oddly enough, require vast sums of money, but instead requires a great deal of something more often in much shorter sapply, even in our own field-imagination.
The shortage of professional computer manpower cannot be relieved by uni-versity professional graduate programs.
One obviously cannot relieve the shortage by hiring those university electrical en-gineering and mathematics professors that show signs of ability, and taking computer design and development lab-oratories before they acquire their Ph.D.'s.
No matter how one disguises it, a com-merciallaboratory, in my opinion, is not a university.
Instead, a little "seed money," ju-diciously placed, might prove an ex-ceedingly high "payoff." Suppose the high light of the Joint Computer Con-ference 2 years from now were to be the presentation of the prize-winning paper by a university graduate student in the area of information systems design?
A prize of $5,000 for further study in the area of computers, provided by, perhaps, Mr. Engstrom's employers, supervised by the National Science Foundation, and judged under the auspices of the Joint Computer Conference, would be, it seems to me, a worth while enticement to many a bright yoang engineer or scien-tist.
Or what about the professors? The trend has been obviously, on purpose or not, away from using university research 148
talent at the universities. The trend has been, rightly or wrongly, away from encouraging university work on com-puter systems. Even if those who parcel out the resources in Washington believe that the day of the university over -all systems design is dead (and I believe that that decision would be ut-terly absurd), university research and talent can still be used on smaller por-tions of the over-all problem: Paper designs of systems, storage components and circuitry, and aatomatic program-ming. When university research in com-puters disappears, university teaching in that area crumbles, and when the latter happens, not even a trickle of qualified graduate students educated in any depth will talk to your recruiting personnel as they make the rounds.
Finally, on the problem of communica-tions: How is a discipline organized so that it can intercommunicate? Gen-erally, that job is a labor of love by uni-versity professors who pass the disci-pline on, better organized, better evalu-ated, and better placed in the proper perspective. Who write the treatises and the textbooks that serve as the starting points for the newcomers in the field? Again, persons in the universities.
Who, in the final analysis, develop the glossaries and the standard terminology?
Committees of the professional and technical societies, nominally, yes, but the university teachers accept or reject eggs, by hiring away professors, neglect-ing the grantneglect-ing of university contracts in computer design and development, leaving the universities as the last re-search areas in our societies to have ade-quate high-powered computational equip-ment.
Nevertheless, I do not want to under-estimate the assistance given to the uni-versities by several organizations. The industry, and the government that re-ceives its benefits, owe much to the be-ginnings made at the University of Pennsylvania, the Massachusetts Insti-tute of Technology, the InstiInsti-tute for Advanced Study, the University of Illi-nois, and other schools. The rules of re-search productivity do not change over-night.
Therefore I shoald like to say, as the result of our meditations, that if a lack of imagination, not of money, a lack of reasoned self -interest on the part of some
manufacturers and, perhaps, a weakening under obvious press ares on the part of Mr. Engstrom's employers, leave no computer systems design or circuitry re-search in the universitites, or very little, as a result, your new designs may fit only the average commercial user'~ adequate pocketbook and inadequate imagination.
Feed a little "seed money" of the many millions being spent into this area, and there is a chance that the problems of personnel, advanced research, and in-tercommunication may still be resolved.
Again, as a critic in the more nearly true sense of the word, let us go on from Mr. Engstrom's and Mr. Whitelock's discussion. Let us evaluate the tech-nical and relatively noncontroversial problem portions of ol1r program. What of formulation and later programming sti11looms, almost completely untouched, as the largest problem of all.
How are these problems to be solved?
By producing equipment as follows:
1. More efficiently mass produced, with a lower cost and smaller size.
2. Much more rapid and therefore much machine, and meanwhile operating more automatically and therefore more reliably.
Again, great strides have been made and discussed during the three days' session in the first three areas: produc-tion and size, speed and expense, and com-ponent and systems reliability; but the improvements in the area of systems match to human being, for example, and over-all automatism must again await the final results of systems which have been merely broached or discussed here.
To meet the needs for greater amounts of internal storage combined with more Carr-Conference Summary
nearly automatic production than that offered by the six Swedish girls who wired the BESK memory in their living rooms, we have been offered, among other things, some very interesting devices. A wound memory element to replace cores has been described by Mr. Tracy. Dr. Rajchman proposes solid plates of material, easily machined. Pohm and Rubens would use magnetic film strips to aid in the pro-duction problems.
As to reliability, there seems to be common agreement that the burial of the vacuum tube is long overdue. "The King is dead," but there is violent dis-agreement over who the new king should be. We have computer circuits with almost every possible combination of elements.
There are computers or circuits that generally use only transistors and re-sistors in Direct-Coupled Transistor-Logic circuitry, such as the Transac de-scribed by Mr. Maddox, and the Tradic Leprechaun described by Mr. Githens.
Mr. Andrews bases his logic on a non-linear inductance. Mr. Hogue proposes a combination of diode gating with non-"
linear inductance. And finally, Mr.
Buck proposes circuits made up of non-linear resistance alone in the cryotron, with driving power now furnished by a refrigerator. The logical designer should be a happy man. He apparently has no dearth of building blocks to work with.
The problem of input-output data handling, if the number of papers is any criterion, has not received the attention that the more glamorous but no more important circuitry has obtained. The three gentlemen from Stanford have neatly combined two signals in one carrier-magnetic-ink and have shown that the presence of large amounts of optical noise does not affect magnetic reading. Let us hope that they will have the chance to extend their device to many more symbols on arbitrary page formats.
The ubiquitous transistor turns up once again in the Radio Corporation of America's transistorized card punch.
We can only chide the authors mildly by reminding them that, while eliminating the vacuum tube, they have not yet elim-inated the punched card. The electro-graphic printer and recorder of Epstein and Kintner is a working system that de-serves further study. It shows the computer user that he is not forever bound to mechanical and photographic devices.
Further effort will be greatly appreci-ated by persons using computing ma-chines to see that the technique of sim-plified display-plotting can be extended.
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We might divide new systems very quickly into "conventional" or "un-conventional" devices, with "conven-tional" or "unconven"conven-tional" approach.
Under the first category, which I will call "conventional devices with uncon-ventional approach," one might list the DATAmatic 1000, the TAPEDrum, the National Cash Register Corporation (NCR)-304 machine, and the Datafile addition to the Datatron system.
For example, the DATAmatic 1000,
Mr. Hollander's discussion this afternoon of the T APEDrum, of course, carries this procedure to the logical extreme.
The NCR -304 produces again a conven-tional machine, but with some unconven-tional procedures that are well worth
A second list might be "unconventional devices with a conventional approach."
The Tradic computer uses the newest DCTL circuitry, but to me it is very much like the old Whirlwind I of almost 8 years ago, in a smaller box. The Transac S-IOOO, discussed by Mr. Mad-dox, is an all-transistor computer, unique in its circuitry, but surprisingly like the Univac Scientific. The TX-O is a very simple machine, built around a fantastically large memory.
Then we can list "unconventional de-vices with an unconventional approach,"
where nothing is spared both in circuitry and in components, and logic of design.
First in the time schedule, apparently, is the Univac-Larc for being the first ma-chine produced. Dr. Eckert discussed the problem of parallelism of structure.
There are to be both editing and calculat-ing devices runncalculat-ing at the same time, with the possibility of two independent calculators. There will be solid-state components techniques. We have heard about several, which may be the fore-runners, from Mr. Bonn and Mr. Torrey, Mr. Keilsohn and Mr. Smoliar, on the accumulator and the shift register that they have devised, using ferractors. We heard about the drum file with moving and floating heads, of I8-megabit size.
The machine which was projected
further into the future, and which there-fore used more "blue sky" components, was the IBM Stretch. Mr. Dunwell again showed that they intended to use parallelism of structure. New tech-niques and circuits are still under de-velopment, aiming at IO-megapulse tran-sistor circuitry. Mr. Lawrence showed us an unusual magnetic-core structure at speeds of possibly smaller than micro-seconds' access time. Mr. Lesser and Mr. Haanstra have talked about the magnetic disk, which is part of a 305 system, but which is also to be part of the Stretch, if the discussion is correct.
Finally, we have had the projected new catalog method, making use of the cryotron, discussed by Mr. Slade and Mr. Buck, in which they told us that they could simultaneously detect in coincidence one item out of half million in about 10 integrated systems approach, with the external language of communication as the starting point and with automatic programming techniques in carrying the language on into the middle of the machine. The delivery of the machine will contain complete compiling systems in both cases.
Information is forced through channels at a rapid rate by paralleling beyond our recent dreams. But our machines are still the same old combination of desk calculator, girl operator, and notebook, that was the model for the EDV AC and the Princeton series. Perhaps the girl now has two notebooks, or writes with both hands, or works two desk calculators at once, but the same structure is basically there.
Criticisms of this sort, by nonproducing critics, are of course a prerogative only
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inductively, meet situations not specifi-cally planned for by its designer or de-signers, and make decisions on a basis of
"studied reasoning"-whatever that may mean.
To me, this is our ultimate challenge, perhaps an unattainable Eldorado, but nevertheless, the "controlled thermo-nuclear reaction" of the computer world, the "big job," toward which parallel com-puters and megabit memories and solid-state designs are only the stepping-stones and not the ends in themselves.
Such machines must automatically have the ability to accept one another's languages, the ability to accept problems which have not been formulated for-mally, for which there has not yet been a detailed program set down; and they must of course have a reliability far beyond
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that of a human being to avoid any momentary aberration.
Men are thinking about such ma-chines now, sometimes in the large com-mercial laboratories, but more often in university departments or independent laboratories, talking of inductive ma-chines, learning devices, theorem-provers, and environment adaptation.
Those of us who are readying the components should be kept aware of the needs. Those of us who are dealing with systems should remember our systems' present limitations. The job of inter-communication, as Sir Watson-Watt noted, is most important.
What can be done in the final analysis?
I have heard comments, for example, on the size of the meeting. I think its growth is vigorous, but the dinosaur
also had its day of collapse. I offer as a companion alternative to complement such affairs comparatively tiny meetings -10 to 30 people from different organ-izations, meeting across occupational boundaries: logical designers with pro-grammers, circuitry personnel with auto-mation specialists, language specialists with programmers, and so on. Such meetings have already been held, more or less successfully-for example, the micro-programming conference at the Massa-chusetts Institute of Technology or the automatic programming conference at the Carnegie Instiute of Technology.
The universities, I think, will be pleased to serve as stimuli. Meanwhile, as a British friend of mine has said,
"This is the best one of these meetings I have ever attended. A lot is going on."
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